


There But For Grace

by Defira



Series: Wild Mage [9]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3179078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corinne Trevelyan would very much rather that people would ignore her surname, and the family who so cruelly set her aside as a babe. When an expedition to the south of Orlais reopens old wounds, it falls to Cullen to prompt her back towards healing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There But For Grace

Corinne was never one to waste time in her letters- sometimes her reports were too terse, too brief in her descriptions of events that seemed impossibly larger than life, and so the advisors often took to relying on the rest of her travelling party for more quietly accurate assessments of her exploits. Where Corinne would write ‘ _quarry secured, location enclosed and hostiles removed_ ’, Dorian would grace them with rather colourful accounts of battles with shrieking lizard-birds as large as horses, who could dance across the shifting sands of the desert like a skater moved over ice while the rest of them slogged through ankle deep drifts. Where Corinne would advise ‘ _red templar encampment destroyed, red lyrium removed_ ’, Vilas would send an account so riddled with expletives that Leliana refused to let Josephine read them.

Cassandra could usually be relied upon to provide the most sensible report of their escapades, brief without being terse, descriptive without falling prey to elaboration. And given that she and Corinne were nigh on inseparable, her versions of events became far more reliable when it came time to assess the success of a mission and plan their next move.

So when the raven returned from the Emerald Graves far to the south of Orlais bearing only one report instead of two, it raised some eyebrows. When the only report enclosed in the capsule on the bird’s leg was penned in Cassandra’s neat hand with no word from Corinne, that was cause for concern.

And when they read the report- _abandoned villa secured, resources available, advise soldiers for retrieval mission_ \- they knew something had gone very wrong. 

It was hard not to fret in dreaded anticipation of the news- was it an injury, was it some new enemy, was it some new power they had not calculated for and could leave the fledgling Inquisition scrambling to recover from its entrance to the game? Why had the report come from Cassandra and Cassandra alone, and what could possibly have unsettled them so keenly that Corinne could offer nothing but silence, while the Seeker too was at a loss for words?

Skyhold simmered uneasily in their absence, and they could only watch the roads into the valley, and wait.

It was mid afternoon and nearly a week after the raven had brought word, and the scouts finally signalled the approach of the party. All figures present and accounted for, going by early reports- no deaths, or noticeable maimings, to which the occupants of the Keep breathed a sigh of relief. The rhythmic clop of the horses hooves as they crossed the bridge echoed through the courtyard, and a good near half the Keep lined the walls to welcome the Herald home. A weary cheer went up at her approach, and her hand went up in greeting.

There was nothing welcoming in her body language, however; no warmth, no good humour, no relief to be back amongst kin and colleagues. Her shoulders were slumped and she stared dead ahead, the reins held weakly in her hands. Behind her, the rest of the party seemed no better, but they at least had some life in them. 

For Corinne, it was as if the spark had gone from her entirely.

Once in the courtyard, she made no acknowledgment of the well wishers gathered to greet her; she scarcely even seemed aware of the stablemaster, sliding from the saddle of her charger without a thought for whether someone was on hand to guide the beast to quiet. That, more than anything, was a warning, for none of her inner circle could remember a time she had purposefully neglected a creature under her care. 

From his place by the wall, Cullen watched her with concern as she drifted towards the stairs, unresponsive to those who called out to her, waving aside Leliana when the spymaster attempted to intercept her on the path up to the great hall. He felt a stone settle in his stomach, an unnamed fear slowly seeping into him like an aching cold.

“You should go to her.”

Startled, Cullen glanced sharply to the left to find Vilas leaning wearily against the wall beside him, the damnable miscreant far too light on his feet for his own good. There was no mischievous grin on his face today, no hint of the rogue he was in the dark circles under his eyes and the thin press to his lips, and Cullen had to admit how rare it was for Corinne’s cousin to let his guard down like this. 

“Why me?” he asked cautiously.

Vilas made a rude noise to convey his incredulity. “ _Please_ , Commander, I’m far too tired to dance around your awkward fascination with my cousin,” he said bluntly. “She needs someone right now, either you or Riana- and we both know Ria can’t make it up the stairs to her tower.”

At the mention of their other cousin, the sullen young woman who had been crippled in the attack on the conclave, Cullen knew that whatever had happened in the Emerald Graves could not be good. Riana had once served as Corinne’s personal guardian, in the Rivaini way of things, and for Vilas to believe that Corinne needed her...

... or him- the implications of that did not go over his head- well, it did not bode well in either case.

Nodding grimly, Cullen pushed off from the wall and climbed the winding stairs up to the hall, murmuring apologies as he weaved in and out of the crowds; the Keep was abuzz with activity now that she had returned, and it did not escape his notice that the whispers that echoed through the grand chamber were not exactly malicious, but were certainly delighted at the drama her arrival had caused. 

He tried not to take offense on her behalf, but merely clenched his jaw and kept his head held high as he made the long walk towards her door. There was a renewed surge of energy in the room when it was noticed where he was headed, and he pretended not to hear the flurry of whispers at his back. 

It was for Corinne. That much he could deal with.

He took the stairs two at a time, grimacing at the twinge in his knee, an old injury that refused to settle. There was still a great deal of clutter and debris in the hallway, more than he would have liked, and he made a note to chase down the quartermaster later; there were other areas of the Keep in drastic need of repairs, and it helped no one to have potential resources languishing in an upstairs corridor. 

Corinne’s door, when he reached it, was closed; not surprising, really. He knocked hesitantly, and when his knocking went unanswered he eased the door open carefully, grateful at least that it was not locked. No sound came from the apartment, no cries of alarm or shouts of fury at his intrusion; he could not hear her pacing, or crying, or _anything_. The room above him might as well have been empty, for all that he could hear. 

Swallowing down the nerves that crept up into his throat to choke him, he climbed the stairs quickly, making no effort to conceal his arrival. He had no desire to surprise her, or take her unawares; if she was in as poor a mood as Vilas seemed to think, he did not fancy startling a mage of her not insignificant talent. 

The apartment too was empty, her travel bags dumped beside the bed and her coat and boots discarded on the floor. He hesitated, loathe to interrupt her should she be in the middle of changing or bathing, but the wind shifted the curtain by the balcony and he caught sight of brown toes and long legs, and the panic he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge in his heart eased a little. 

He made sure to make plenty of noise as he approached the balcony- feet dragging on the carpet, clearing his throat, nothing that could surprise her last minute. She didn’t look up when he finally parted the gauzy curtain and stepped out onto the stone with her, her back to the wall and her legs stretched out before her as she gazed off into nothing. There was a weight on her, something bleak and heavy and terrible, and it frightened him how easily he knew that. 

_Knowing_ was the wrong word, though- he could _feel_ it, feel her distress, like echoes of his own, like a memory flitting just beyond his reach. He didn’t just know that she was in pain, he could feel it, and it was that that made him sit just beyond her reach, instead of beside her, with space of his own so that he could process the enormity of it all. 

She still didn’t look up, and he didn’t press her; he watched her, waiting for her to look his way, waiting for her facade to crumble and give way to the tears and the anger he felt chipping away at her from the inside. When she finally spoke, her choice of conversation left him scrambling to find his balance.

“You know I’m adopted,” she said, abrupt and blunt as always. She never danced around an issue, never shied away from what needed to be said. Sometimes it took her a time to find the courage to voice it, but she never hesitated once she was on the path; he admired that about her. 

Watching her carefully, Cullen said “You made it known fairly early on that your family name would offer us no benefit, yes. And you’ve never made a secret of your circumstances.”

Something in his choice of words distressed her, and her head fell back against the wall with a huffed sound that was probably intended to be a laugh but came out more like a moan. “That’s the most diplomatic way of putting it, yes,” she said, her voice hoarse, as if she had spent a great many days trapped in grief. “More directly, one could say that I was not wanted.”

There was something there, some wild and magnificent pain hiding behind those words, but he held his tongue.

She opened her eyes again, but she still did not look at him. “I should be grateful,” she spat suddenly, her mood lurching from pain to anger from one heartbeat to the next. “Grateful that they showed their hand from the beginning, and did not force me to endure a lifetime of their inanities and posturing.”

He breathed out slowly through his nose, cautious as he considered his words. “Corinne,” he said softly, “what happened in Orlais?”

Corinne snapped around to look at him, her dark eyes wide and wild and brimming with tears. “There was a girl,” she said, her voice scarcely more than a rasped whisper. “A little girl, alone and afraid and frustrated and bored. Hidden away in shame, locked up in horror.”

His skin rippled with a shiver of unease, and he did not know whether it was his own or whether he was far too connected to her own emotional distress. “What girl, Corinne?”

“A noble girl,” she whispered. “In a country estate, far from the world, where no one could hear her scream, where no one could hear her rage. They tried to fix her, and it only made it worse.”

“Is this about the manor Cassandra mentioned?” he asked carefully. Corinne looked away sharply, a hand going to her mouth as if she wanted to hide the way her lip trembled. “Was the girl a mage?”

“She was just a _child_ ,” she rasped, the first tear spilling onto her cheek as she refused to look at him. “They locked her away and taught her to hate herself, told her that she needed fixing to be worth their love.”

Cullen held his breath for a few beats, trying to gauge the best way to respond to her pain. “And what happened?” he asked quietly.

“What do you _think_ happened, Cullen?” she snapped, shifting to rest her elbow on her knee and rest her palm against her forehead. Her eyes were closed up tight, her face twisted as she fought back the storm inside of her, but the tears kept coming. “I’m sure you’ve been _lucky_ enough to witness it a hundred times over.”

The barb didn’t sting as much as it might have a year ago, and he didn’t begrudge her the need to lash out in her grief. “Corinne,” he said, “you can’t save everyone. What happened to that girl was not your fault-”

She made a sound of disgusted frustration, rolling her head to the side to glare at him through tear sodden lashes. “I am well aware that it was not my fault,” she said. “I am upset because she could very easily have been _me_.”

Suddenly her silence and her grief crystallized before him in perfect clarity, and he cursed himself for a fool for not realizing sooner.

“A young noble girl born and raised on the far flung edges of civilization,” she said, counting the similarities off on her fingers, “only for magic to ruin everything. But where my parents cast me aside, her parents tried to save her, by destroying pieces of her slowly.”

“Corinne,” he said softly.

“If my parents had decided I was worth the risk, if they’d decided to love me in the same perverse fashion, would that have been my fate? A broken, twisted little girl, giggling at the shadows in the corners of the room as they whispered temptations to me? Tormenting the house staff and finally succumbing to possession and death?” Her voice rose with every word, a little more frantic and a little more bitter each time, until she finally broke off at the end on a sob, and it occurred to him that apart from the immediate aftermath of their flight from Haven, he had never seen her cry. 

She was the Herald, the Inquisitor, defiant and wild and bold and brash and unconventional, and in a sense he’d let that persona take on a life of its own; now, seeing it stripped away to expose the grieving and very human woman beneath it, he realised just how much he’d been taken in by the stories they’d been weaving for the sake of the people. 

And her pain echoed through him, the fear sharp and the shame blooming like a fresh bruise across her heart. She was ashamed of herself, for the horrors inflicted upon a young girl, ashamed that she was glad to have escaped such a fate. 

So she wept, turning her face away from him and shifting her body to shield herself from his watching eyes, her hands doing a poor job to hide her tears. 

There was never any doubt in his heart as to what he should do for her in that moment; they had made no promises to one another, and as much as he enjoyed her company, their conversations had never truly ventured into contentious waters. Sometimes he fancied that she laughed a little more in his presence, or that her smile lingered slightly when they spoke, but beyond that... it was hard to say. 

As a templar, he would have been intensely wary of a mage gripped by such violent emotions. But as a man struggling to find his feet and his moral compass in this new world, he couldn’t quite find it in him to succumb to old suspicions. 

Corinne did not look up when he shifted across the balcony to sit beside her, but she did not flinch or snarl when he eased his arm over her hunched shoulders either. When he coaxed her into his side, his hand gentle but firm on her arm, she resisted for a moment out of stubbornness before grief overwhelmed her, and she collapsed against him with a choked sob. 

He held her while she cried, while her fingers dug into the fur of his pauldrons and her tears left his throat damp. It was an odd sight, to be sure- the two of them sprawled on the balcony floor, mage and templar, Commander and Inquisitor, awkward friends and possibly more. Cullen couldn’t say why he felt drawn to her, or why her cousin seemed to have sensed that same connection, or why Corinne had even allowed him to witness such a personal and painful moment. 

She was softer in his arms, almost smaller- brittle in a way that made him think he held her too tight she would shatter into wickedly sharp pieces. 

He would not let it come to that. 

He held her through the storm of her pain, resting his cheek against her hair and running his hand in quiet, soothing strokes along her arm. He did not offer her false cheer and promises, for that would insult the both of them, and he did not race to reassure her that her hurt was misplaced. He didn’t really have anything he could say for her, and so he said nothing, and he let her grieve in the comfort of a friend’s arms. 

When the worst of the tears had passed and she lay shuddering and hiccuping against his chest, he pressed a hesitant kiss to her forehead, and in the silence that followed he heard her whisper ‘ _thank you_ ’.


End file.
